California AG office reviewing DoJ filing, “[We] look forward to defending California’s state net neutrality protections.”

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo today announced a five-part “Clean Network” effort from the Trump administration which Pompeo says is to limit potential national security risks from China. Read the rest

Graham Clark, the 17-year-old Florida boy accused of pulling off the big Twitter hack, pled not guilty to charges on Tuesday. During the security breach, top accounts including Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk were taken over to push a bitcoin scam. Read the rest

Multiple news outlets citing multiple sources report TikTok rumor, but Apple denies

China isn't prepared to accept the “theft” of Chinese technology company TikTok, and has the capability to respond to Trump's move to push ByteDance to sell short-video app TikTok’s U.S. operations to Microsoft, state-controlled China Daily newspaper said on Tuesday. Read the rest

Twitter disclosed in a regulatory filing it faces up to $250 million FTC fine over use of your phone # & email data to target advertisements

WATCH THE SPLASHDOWN EVENT LIVE HERE, the SpaceX video embed in this post will go live with pre-event content sometime before 7pm EDT on Saturday August 1. Read the rest

“Texas is investigating Facebook for possibly running afoul of state laws on the collection of biometric data, according to June documents uncovered by a tech watchdog group,” reports Ashley Gold at Axios. Read the rest

Put it in your calendar.

The CEOs of Facebook, Amazon.com Inc, Alphabet’s Google, and Apple, are all scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel on July 27. Read the rest

Aerogel, the synthetic material made of about 1% microporous silica and 99% air, has extremely low density, extremely low thermal conductivity, and extremely low chances of turning out OK when made in a home lab. It took YouTuber NileRed many months of trial and error. Read the rest

Hackers working for China's government targeted firms working on coronavirus vaccines, and stole hundreds of millions of dollars worth of intellectual property and trade secrets, claims the Justice Department in a statement Tuesday announcing criminal charges. Read the rest

University of Washington engineers developed a tiny, wireless, and steerable videocamera that can be worn by insects or minuscule micro-robots to stream live video. The device weighs just 248 milligrams. Evan Ackerman writes in IEEE Spectrum:

The system was successfully tested on a pair of darkling beetles that were allowed to roam freely outdoors, and the researchers noted that they could also mount it on spiders or moths, or anything else that could handle the payload. (The researchers removed the electronics from the insects after the experiments and observed no noticeable adverse effects on their behavior.)

The researchers are already thinking about what it might take to put a wireless camera system on something that flies, and it’s not going to be easy—a bumblebee can only carry between 100 and 200 mg [...]

Insects are very mobile platforms for outdoor use, but they’re also not easy to steer, so the researchers also built a little insect-scale robot that they could remotely control while watching the camera feed.

"A Bug-Sized Camera for Bug-Sized Robots and Bug-Sized Bugs" (IEEE Spectrum)

"Wireless steerable vision for live insects and insect-scale robots" (Science Robotics)

Read the rest

A trio of lawsuits filed Tuesday against Microsoft, Google owner Alphabet, and Amazon accuses the tech companies of training their facial recognition tools on photos of people that have not given their consent, which is a violation of Illinois law. Read the rest

This is quite a major hack.

Now is a good time to change your Twitter password, if you are a user.

Hackers pumping a cryptocurrency giveaway scam appear to have compromised the Twitter accounts of leading exchanges, prominent individuals, major corporations, and at least one news organization. Read the rest

The mobile phones of a number of politicians in Spain, including the president of Catalonia's parliament, were recently hacked. The government of Spain has been an NSO customer since 2015, reports Motherboard on Tuesday.

NSO Group is an Israeli company that sells surveillance and hacking tools to governments around the world. Read the rest

Twitch just un-banned Donald Trump. The impeached U.S. president's official Twitch channel [Link] had been suspended for two weeks for violating the streaming video platform's rules against hateful conduct. Read the rest

Unsealed court documents reveal the identity of Fxmsp, a hacker from Kazakhstan who is blamed for information theft from more than 300 companies and governments, in 44 different countries around the world. Read the rest